Ancient Footprints Provide a Look at Life Long Ago

 

White Sands National Monument, in southern of New Mexico has given scientists a unique view into the lives of people living long ago. Here, amid the pristine, white gypsum sand dunes that surrounded an ancient lake, scientists have discovered the footprints of a woman and child who were crossing the sands. They have also found footprints from a hunt involving ancient human beings and a large prehistoric sloth. Both discoveries are extremely rare and could change our understanding of how long ago people were in the area and how they interacted with large animals.

The footprints of the woman and child are part of what is considered the longest preserved "trace" of a person's fossilized footprints. Found on the plateau of a dried-up untouched lake bed, they extend for almost a full mile. The area also has hundreds of thousands of footprints of various ice age animals, including Columbian mammoths, giant sloths, sabertoothed cats, dire wolves, and giant bison.

The reason researchers believe that the person who crossed the plateau was a woman is because of the size of her feet. A second set of much smaller footprints amble about, sometimes disappearing and reappearing some distance away. This indicates that the woman was traveling with a small child who sometimes walked and sometimes was carried.

The woman seems to have been in a hurry to get somewhere. Scientists came to this conclusion based on the distance between the prints. The woman seems to have been walking at 1.7 meters per second, which is much faster than the average relaxed walking speed of between 1.2 and 1.5 meters per second. Her tracks, unlike the meandering smaller tracks, follow a straight line, indicating that she was traveling to a specific place, and that she knew where she was going. Scientists say that a second set of tracks moving in the opposite direction are also hers, indicating that hours later, she returned the same way, but without the child.

A second set of tracks tells an even more interesting story, with more graphic details. Researchers have found more than 100 footprints dating back between 11,000 and 15,000 years ago that seem to show humans following, and perhaps hunting, a giant ground sloth. The animals, which disappeared about 11,000 years ago, could reach the size of an elephant. Although the distance between steps for a giant sloth is greater than that of a human step, the footprints show that the human hunters were following the sloth, sometimes walking directly in the giant beast’s footsteps.

In some places, the human footprints appear close to the sloth’s markings, and one human appears to have gotten up on tip-toe very close to the animal. The sloth, then, appears to have suddenly changed direction, and researchers suggest that it stood up on its back legs and flailed about with its front legs in order to defend itself.

Matthew Bennett, the lead writer of a recent report on the discovery that appeared in the scientific publication Science Advances says that hunting such a large animal "would have come with huge amounts of risk." The geology professor from Bournemouth University in England has studied these tracks and others, and speculates that they can help prove whether or not early men played a role in the eradication of mega fauna at the end of the last Ice Age.

 

My novel, In the Shadow of Sunrise, tells the story of Earth Shadow, a handicapped boy who goes on his first Walk Around, where he has the chance to prove his manhood. By the time that Earth Shadow walked along Lake Lucero, a thousand years had passed, and with it, most of the megafauna that roamed the plains of North America. Earth Shadow is a member of the Folsom culture, and the only large beasts left are the Bison Antiquus, an early, and much larger form of the American Bison that continues to live on the great plains. Earth Shadow recognizes that the footprints he sees are old, but he doesn’t know how old. He must rely on the stories of his people.

Recently, scientists found seeds from the aquatic plant Ruppia cirrhosa in the same levels of sand as the human footprints and subjected them to radiocarbon dating. The procedures produced dates between 23,000 and21,000 years ago.  Although these ages might have been skewed by potentially old carbon reservoirs, it might indicate that humans inhabited North America far longer than has been previously supposed.

Jennifer Bohnhoff left teaching English and History at the middle school level to become a full time teacher. Her latest book, In the Shadow of Sunrise, tells the story of a handicapped boy on the cusp of adulthood and is based on extensive research into the Folsom Period in what is now Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas. It will be published by Kinkajou Press, a division of Artemesia Publishing in April of 2025 and is currently available as a preorder through Amazon, Bookshop, and other online booksellers, as well as directly from the author.